Although Pindar's Homer began its life as the Mary
Flexner Lectures in the Humanities at Bryn Mawr College in 1982, it
clearly represents far more than a revised transcript of that event. The
book looks more like a lifetime's work: over five hundred pages,
elegantly produced with expansive footnotes and copious bibliography,
wrapped in a glossy black dustjacket that gives it an authoritative, if
somewhat daunting, feel. It is, truly, a magnum opus, and although it is
unlikely to be Nagy's last word on many of the subjects he treats, he has
obviously taken great pains to present his material in the most
comprehensive manner possible.

Pindar's Homer is,
in some ways, the book many have been waiting for since The
Best of the Achaeans (Baltimore 1979). The latter dazzled us from
start to finish with new and often iconoclastic readings of archaic texts, and
gave birth, as if by a thunderbolt, to a major hermeneutic extension
of Parryism that boldly confronted major issues in Greek poetics and in
the interaction of Greek poetry and culture.1Pindar's Homer essentially takes
up where The Best of the Achaeans left off, extending Nagy's basic
approach to Greek epic formulated in the earlier book to "the full range
of poetic and song-making traditions in early Greek civilization" (p. 2).
One major difference between the two works, however, is that the newer
book, though every bit as complex as The Best of the Achaeans and
in many ways even more ambitious, is easier to read. Nagy is always very
careful, for example, to let the reader know exactly how a given discussion
relates to his central theses (on which see below). This is not an
insignificant feature of the book in view of Nagy's unique style of
argumentation and his eclectic methodology. He intertwines many seemingly
different and unrelated threads of evidence, and his most important
arguments tend to develop slowly, subtly and incrementally over hundreds
of pages rather than over a few, so that it is useful to have frequent
reminders (through meticulous cross-references and useful recapitulations)
of how a given argument has evolved throughout the course of the
book.

Over the past two decades Nagy has been striving to
counteract the various modern preconceptions about and constructions of
archaic poetry which, in his view, impede a clearer understanding of how
the poets worked within their traditions. Specifically Nagy bristles at
the prevalent modern discomfort at reconciling poetic "genius" or
"value" with an undeniably oral tradition. At the same time, most
classical scholars continue (as they have for several centuries), to
privilege the notion of the individual author as the primary force in
poetic composition. It is no surprise that as soon as our evidence allows
us to speak comfortably of historically real poets, we start to hear of,
as Nagy puts it (p. 2), the "rise of individual innovation over collective
tradition." Even though it is slowly becoming unfashionable
(thankfully) to speak of Greek lyric in such simplistic terms, it cannot
be denied that scholars still generally think of Homeric epic and Greek
lyric as fundamentally distinct, albeit related, traditions, and that
they tend to attribute this distinction to a contrast between "oral" and
"written" culture. In Pindar's Homer, Nagy is not out
to argue that Greek lyric is the "same" as epic, that it is "oral" in
the same sense as Homer, that lyric poets didn't use writing or couldn't
express their private thoughts. Rather, he argues for three basic points:
(1) that archaic, and at least some classical, poetry is part of a dynamic
continuum; (2) that we can detect a unifying "Panhellenic" impulse in
the poetic production in this period (or at least in the poetry that
became canonical early on), and (3) that in post-Homeric poetry the
forces exercised by vibrant, continuous poetic traditions can account more
accurately for how poets appropriate other poets and genres than the
narrow concept of "poetic borrowing" or "citation."

Nagy has
been arguing these three points in one form or another throughout most of
his work, but Pindar's Homer now focuses specifically on
post-Homeric poetry. Nagy uses Pindar as his main example throughout since
Pindar is the latest of the lyric poets in the Alexandrian canon and,
perhaps even more importantly, because of the metrical and thematic
affinities Nagy finds between Pindar and epos (pp. 3-4). Still, the book
is less "about" Pindar or his "uses" of epic than it is about the
substrata that unified even highly differentiated forms of Greek poetry up
to the end of the fifth century.

Nagy lays the foundation for his
whole approach in the first chapter, aptly entitled "Oral Poetry and
Ancient Greek Poetry: Broadening and Narrowing the Terms." Indeed in this
fascinating
chapter Nagy seeks to extend and redefine our conception of orality in
such a way that the term can easily accomodate archaic lyric as well,
without denying the existence or use of writing by poets in this tradition
as a means of transmission: "... so long as the traditions of oral
poetry are alive in a given society, a written record cannot by itself
affect a composition or a performance, and ... it cannot stop the
process of recomposition in performance" (p. 19). This approach, which
draws persuasively on the work of social anthropology, essentially
liberates us from our often unacknowledged prejudices about what
constitutes poetry by urging us to think of the written aspect of poetry
only as one specialized (he would say "marked") feature of poetry in
general (an "unmarked" category that embraces all specific
manifestations such as song and recitative, "whether oral or written").
In short, Nagy makes it possible to speak of Greek epic and lyric as part
of an ongoing process of poetic differentiation and transformation.

To support further his argument that poetic differentiation in archaic
poetry can be seen as a continuum, Nagy restates and embellishes the
conclusions of an earlier work (cf. above n.1), in which he attempted to
show that the dactylic hexameter of epic can be explained as a
differentiation of various lyric metrical forms, i.e. that the hexameter
was constituted from already existent lyric meters (cf. p. 48 and
Appendix, pp. 439-64). This position in turn bolsters Nagy's idea of how
Greek poetry developed: SONG [sic] (a form of "marked" speech that may
or may not have had melody) differentiating into song types (song in our
sense of the word, having melody) and poetry (non-melodic, as in dactylic
hexameter or elegiac distich). Homeric epic, then, while it imitates
song, and can refer to itself as song, was, synchronically speaking, not
song but "poetry" (in Nagy's sense of non-melodic poetry). The
references to song in epic point to its origins as undifferentiated SONG,
although the epic as it was performed by rhapsodes was more like
recitative. Similarly, the metrical affinities that Nagy isolates between
the Homeric hexameter and the diachronically later song (lyric) tradition
of Pindar suggest to him that undifferentiated SONG was a kind of well-spring
from which all (archaic, at least) Greek poetry in some sense
derives.

In the chapters that discuss the Panhellenic diffusion of
poetry, Nagy again clarifies some positions taken in earlier work (Ch. 2),
and attempts to extend his theory to the lyric tradition (Ch. 3). Chapter
2 is especially compelling, as Nagy explains how, during the gradual
process of poetic diffusion from initial (oral) composition to textual
fixation, the very notion of the author is transformed into a generic
concept (e.g., p. 79). Nagy contrasts by way of example the Homeric epics
(i.e. the Iliad and Odyssey) with the poems of the Epic
Cycle. He accounts for the "superior prestige of the Homeric poems on the
basis of their greater Panhellenic orientation and diffusion" (p. 72),
whereas, for example, the Aithiopis focused on local traditions of
Miletus. He even
argues that canon formation in antiquity (made possible by textual
fixation) arose as a result of Panhellenic diffusion. The mechanics of
this process are difficult to imagine with precision, given our evidence,
but Nagy's basic insight is
profound and persuasively set forth. As he summarizes at the beginning of
Chapter 3 (p. 82): "The concept of Panhellenism helps explain not only
how the multiple traditions of Archaic Greek oral poetry became a
synthetic tradition but also how this tradition ... tended to
counteract the emergence of historically verifiable authorship."

The crucial question Nagy must address (in Chapter 3 and elsewhere), if
he is going to regard Pindar and the epinician tradition as Panhellenic
(which he must do, of course, if he is to argue for a unifying, synthetic
tradition going back to Homer and beyond), is, how can a localized and
highly occasional genre such as the epinician be at the same time
"Panhellenic?" The route Nagy takes to answer this is highly involved,
but I quote here his conclusion (p. 114): "Though each of Pindar's
victory odes was an occasional composition, centering on a single
performance, each containing details grounded in the historical realities
of the time and place of performance, still each of these victory odes
aimed at translating its occasion into a Panhellenic event, a thing of
beauty that could be replayed by and for Hellenes for all time to
come."

I have spent considerable time on the early chapters
because they are essential for understanding where Nagy is heading in the
rest of the book. The book's fourteen chapters cover an enormous amount of
material, draw on practically every aspect of antiquity for evidence and
employ a variety of methodologies. After the "introductory" chapters,
however, Nagy basically deals with three major topics: Pindar and Homer;
Pindar and Herodotus; and the effects of fifth-century Athenian society on
the lyric medium.

In Chapters 4-7, Nagy examines in great detail
the relationship between Homer and Pindar from the point of view of the
hermeneutic models he set forth at the beginning of the book. Contrary to
what one might expect, Nagy's Pindar is every bit as different from Homer
as one finds in any handbook, but with a twist. Epinician is certainly not
Homeric epic, but both genres are fundamentally concerned with kleos, and
epinician seems to authorize its praise of victors with reference to the
praise of past heroes. Moreover, the milieu of praise poetry (or ainos),
the athletic agon, had a ritual dimension that connected contemporary
victors with heroes of the past. Pindar is quite self-conscious about
this, as Nagy shows with a number of detailed examples in Chapter 6
(Pythians 6 and 8, and Isthmian 8), and his description of
the Pindaric ainos as a "form of expression that purports to close the
gap between the heroic past and the historic present" (p. 193) seems well
justified. So
while Pindaric epinician and Homeric epic serve different social
functions and are performed on different occasions in different media (one
lyric and choral, the other non-lyric and monodic), nevertheless each one
can be defined in terms of the other on a fundamental level, and both can
be seen as differentiations of a kind of "proto-Song" (in Nagy's
terminology undifferentiated SONG). As for the problem of how the
occasional and localized Pindaric ainos attains Panhellenic status and
transcends its own occasion, Nagy explains this with reference to the
politics of patronage. Paradoxically, the tyrants who by and large
supported poets such as Pindar for their own prestige and who would revel
in the localized veneer of epinician, themselves became the subtle targets
of an ainos tradition of moralizing and warning (see following
paragraphs) that was universalizing and Panhellenic.

Probably the
boldest and most controversial chapters of the book are those in which
Nagy argues for including the prose of Herodotus in his scheme of poetic
development. We are prepared for this somewhat in the first chapter, where
Nagy derives prose as well as "song" and "poetry" from a proto-SONG.
This notion may at first seem to run counter to common sense: surely, one
might object, prose must be a direct manifestation of everyday speech, an
"unmarked" member of an opposition in which poetry is the "marked"
member. Or, as Nagy puts it (p. 47): "... prose seems closer than poetry
to speech in that it does not have the same degree of specialized
patterning in rhythm." But Nagy's Herodotus was a product of an oral
tradition, and as such his prose seems more akin to "de-poeticized"
poetry than to speech (cf. p. 47 for more detail). Nagy analyzes closely
the prooemium of the Histories and argues convincingly that, even
if we imagine Herodotus holed up in a study surrounded by every conceivable
writing instrument, his apodeixis was a "public demonstration of an oral
performance" (p. 220). His statement in ftn.16 on p. 217 is an important
step in the argument: "... the rhetoric of Herodotus' prooemium in
particular and his entire composition in general is predicated on the
traditions of speaking before a public, not of writing for readers. To me,
that in itself is enough to justify calling such traditions oral."

Once Nagy has established a formal link between prose and poetry, of
course, the way is paved for examining Herodotean narrative in this new
light. The program of Chapters 8-11 is set out on p. 215: "Like the ainos
of Pindar, the historia of Herodotus is a form of discourse that claims
the authority to possess and control the epic of heroes." Basically Nagy
argues, through detailed linguistic and cultural analysis, that the
Herodotean discourse of historia has a fundamental juridical aspect to it
that allies it with the ainos of Pindaric poetry (here ainos takes on its
other meaning of "fable"). In other words, both historia and the ainos
are discourses that judge, moralize and often warn obliquely rather than
straightforwardly (a quick example from Herodotus: Solon "does not tell
Croesus directly what we find him teaching in his own poetry, that ate is
brought about by hybris"
[p. 262]). Nagy even goes so far as to state (p. 314) that Herodotus'
Histories is "shaped by the principles of the ainos," by which
he means that the "thought patterns" associated with historia are akin
to those of the Pindaric ainos. Like Pindar and Homer, Herodotus too is
fundamentally concerned with conveying kleos, and as such he can be seen
as part of a poetic tradition. Herodotus himself, although a prose writer
(logios), used poetry (especially in his relating of oracular utterances)
self-consciously as an implicit code, a means, if I understand Nagy
correctly, of punctuating explicit historical narrative with his
own judgment in the manner of an ainos. As he states on p. 329:
"[Herodotus is] ... like Pindar in his mastery of the ainos, though his
medium is not ainos; rather, it contains the ainos. For Herodotus, the
heritage of ainos is to be found in the traditions of poetry and song
making as they are contained and applied in his Histories by way of
quotation, paraphrase or mere reference." Towards the end of the book
(Chs. 12 and 13) Nagy takes up subjects he has alluded to throughout,
namely authorship, textual fixation, and the question of how occasional
poetry could achieve Panhellenic status. Chapter 13 in particular offers a
highly original and provocative study of fifth-century Athenian culture,
in which he examines the interaction between politics and poetry during
this period and argues that the Athenian democracy was transforming the
"old aristocratic poetics into the new popular poetics of the City
Dionysia." The result was an increased need for elite private schooling,
which in turn became the "nondemocratic self-expression of aristocrats,
the new breeding ground for tyrants" (p. 405). Canons of "Classics"
arose for educational purposes, as students and teachers began to read
texts nostalgically rather than perform them. Thus, ironically enough,
while tyrants originally played an important role in the development of
Pindaric poetry (as Nagy discusses in detail throughout the book, though
cf. Ch. 6 especially), it was only after they were fully supplanted by a
democracy at Athens, and their presence in some circles was missed, that
Pindar achieved his final fixity. The irony is even greater if Nagy is
correct to
see in the epinician ainos a tension between localizing and Panhellenizing
elements (see above, and a convenient summary on p. 436), since we would
then have a situation in the later fifth century in which aristocrats who
idealized a cultural milieu that bred potential tyrants desired as a fixed
poetic ideal what an earlier age of tyrants had admired for its localized
political utility.

I have only been able to offer a small glimpse
of a monumental and fascinating work, and I have had to neglect scores of
topics and sub-topics introduced by Nagy which lead in many directions.
Even though the sheer volume and range of the material demand the
reader's full and constant attention, in the end Nagy succeeds in
articulating his challenging and in many ways unique vision of the
development of Greek poetry. Naturally, a work as ambitious as this cannot
hope to satisfy every reader at every turn, and many of Nagy's arguments
will no doubt generate controversy. Some arguments are breathtakingly
brilliant while others on occasion appear to border on the tendentious, or
seem to beg a premise or two. And, of course, all readers will find places
where they desire further clarification or where Nagy's discussion
provokes a new set of questions. (I would have liked to hear more, for
example, about how exactly Nagy envisions the practical effects of growing
literacy on poetic [and prose] composition. How exactly, for example, did
Pindar's method of composition differ from, say, that of Homer or Hesiod
on the one hand, and Callimachus or Apollonius on the other?) It would be
easy, moreover, to fault the book for over-schematizing, for trying with
relentless zeal to find unity at every turn. But Nagy himself seems to be
aware that he cannot be telling the whole story, that the evidence for the
archaic period is often sketchy, particularly in matters of social
history, and that his work will need further refinement here and there.
Still, when we find ourselves speaking vaguely of an "archaic mindset"
or wondering why we sometimes have that mysterious sense that all archaic
and classical Greek poetry is of a piece, we can at least find one
fully-formed model that attempts to explain such perceptions, and that
does so with remarkable insight, boldness and passion.

NOTES

[1] Nagy, of course, began
developing the
technical underpinnings of his ideas on archaic poetry in Comparative
Studies in Greek and Indic Meter (1974), but it wasn't until The
Best of the Achaeans that we found him articulating (to a wider
audience in particular) the larger ramifications of the earlier
work.